


Sunrise

by PraxisDescends



Category: Protean City Comics (Podcast)
Genre: Childus Interruptus, F/M, Flirty Lunar Lens, Late Night Conversations, Literal Sleeping Together, Miscommunication, PCOY, Protean City Comics, Who the heck is Elliot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-25
Updated: 2018-01-25
Packaged: 2019-03-09 03:44:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13473006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PraxisDescends/pseuds/PraxisDescends
Summary: "He’d be gone by morning, he always was."They have an arrangement that works for them, it's worked for years, but what does it mask? Can he really be a part of her life, when they both have so many depending on them?(No spoilers contained)





	Sunrise

He’d be gone by morning, he always was. 

If he knew that she expected it, then he never said. It was unspoken now, he would appear when things were quiet in the city, spend the night in her bed, tangled in her sheets, then leave while she slept. 

She would feel him slip away while she was half asleep, on the brink of waking. Then she would move to fill the void he left behind. Enjoying his warmth, and the aching weary feeling he left behind. It had been over a decade since she’d found herself wrapped up in any serious relationship, and it had been damaging to both her and PCOY.

This was simpler, less messy. They both got what they needed and then parted ways. Both had their own responsibilities. Both dedicated to something bigger than they were. There was also something mildly thrilling about him coming back, still finding something he needed here.

Tonight was different though, she felt the absence of him in her bed immediately with a jolt. She knew it wasn’t even approaching the start of her day. 

All was dark as she sat up. Of course, it was no bother for her, her eyes refocused to shade and dark and she saw him by her window. His back curved against the wall beside open window. On the first floor there wasn’t much to see, just the tenement block across the street. She was warm within her bed sheets, but something in the tension of his posture intrigued her. Try as she might, she could never resist the temptation to analyse the people around her. Silently she slipped out of bed and retrieved her discarded robe to shield her bare skin from the chill breeze.

Blinking through the gloom she crossed the room, effortlessly avoiding the upturned table that they’d managed to flip on their way to bed. Usually the frantic mess they made would be her problem in the morning, but she took advantage of the opportunity to make progress without cutting a direct line to him. Instead busied herself gathering his clothes; worn jeans, dark hoodie (wallet tucked in the pocket). She swore it was the same t shirt as last time, and the chances of him owning more than one was non-zero. 

Everything was roughly folded on her nightstand. It was a satisfying task. He hadn’t looked at her while she moved. It could have been an insult, but she knew better. It meant he trusted her to move softly in the darkness in his blindspot. She shot a look at him, something was playing over and over in his mind, something he wasn’t able to move on from. Often when he visited her, both of them would walk away lighter, but whatever this was had coiled up in him deep.

He sat half stretched out onto her fire escape, barely visible to anyone who wasn’t her, his fingers precariously wrapped around a half-done cigarette. The ember flared near his face, picking out the deep circles under his eyes, the grey in his stubble, his hair was getting long again, there was unconscious tension across his exposed shoulders. He’d come to her tired, but not to unwind clearly since he’d rolled out of bed at close to 3am just to stare out of her window. 

She stopped to refocus her eyes, she wasn’t trying to make a study of him. It was just that, for all his abilities to remain unnoticed, he showed her far more than he intended. 

He finally cast his eye her way, taking in her long bare limbs with an appreciative look. Reaching out her hand to brush down his, she settled in beside him and he shivered, letting his eyes close. She had always liked their easy silences, he put up fewer walls like this. Warmth radiated off him, despite his arm hanging out of the window, and the cold night air rolling onto them both. 

In a smooth motion she slid her body closer to him, her hair falling to brush his exposed chest. He turned expectantly, preparing for the contact that never came. Instead, her arm stretched in line with his and took the still lit cigarette from his fingers, before deftly flicking it out into the street.  
“Revolting habit,” she chided with a soft smile.

He turned to frown at her for a moment, before taking advantage of her open robe, to grip her sides and pull her up onto his knee. She had never had a problem being manhandled by him, he was the sort of person who needed to be aware of all the potential elements in any situation. Years of training and caution all coiled up in one man. Normally she might have been more aloof, but in her space, where she had the upper hand of sight, it made for a more level playing field.

When he kissed her, she couldn’t help but smile pushing her hands through his hair, as he wrapped his around her back, slipping beneath her robe. He was sweet when he was being affectionate. The contrast of his warm and cold arm raised goosebumps down her back, and as they broke away she kissed his forehead.  
“Back to bed?” she whispered against his skin. She hadn’t intended it to be seductive, but even she was surprised by how nurturing her tone was, her hands sliding down to wrap around the back of his neck. 

Hesitating for half a second, he nodded lifting her up against his body and carrying her back through the room. She could tell he had shelved his earlier concerns, for future consideration. In the meantime she had him back. She was up in three hours, that was surely enough time to distract them both. 

He settled her down beside him and kissed her again, both sat on the edge of the bed, on the cusp of collapsing into it. Reaching up, he brushed a strand of hair from her face, his hand freezing as he heard the unmistakable pad of feet on the steps to her study. The light clicking on in the hall outside gleamed under the doorframe, and she heard her eyes click as they blinked painfully. 

Both scrambled from the bed, her to throw on her nightdress, him to the hidden spot behind the door. His hand wrapped around a hefty statuette, his entire body stiff. She gave him a look, that he couldn’t see and tied her dressing closed as she heard a small knock on her door and a voice,

“Lens?” he sounded so unsure, sleepy and scared. It wasn’t the first time one of the younger children had had a nightmare, but they didn’t usually come all the way to her room. She unlatched the door and looked down at her young charge, haloed by the golden hall light. 

He’d been crying, still was a little, his hands grabbing for the edge of her robe in an attempt to steady himself. She knelt down to scoop him up, he was too big for this really, but she was incapable of resenting a seven year old boy who needed someone to tell him it was going to be ok. 

“Bad dream, Elliot?” He nodded against her neck, mumbling.  
“It was going to get me. It was chasing me, and and I was falling, but I couldn’t get away. And I tried to fly away, but it got me it always gets me.” 

He was crying again, as she walked through the home, skirting around the rooms where the others were sleeping, to the kitchen. She let him talk, a tight arm wrapped around him, while the other ran through his dark curls. He sounded weak and exhausted. Some of the others had been unkind about him waking them up, so he’d learned to cry in quiet. The thought broke her heart, and when she realised what he’d been doing, he knew he could come and find her.

“It’s ok to have bad dreams, little one,” she said tenderly, moving them both through the kitchen to get the milk out of the cupboard. Long life, but it would have to do. She adjusted his weight onto her hip, while he rubbed his damp cheek against her shoulder.. “None of us are in control of what we dream, and nightmares are built from our mind of the things that scare us most.”

She put the cup in the microwave, then placed the child up on the counter so he was at her eye-height.  
“We all have things that scare us,” she knew she’d said this to him before but hoped repeating it would help. She tore a piece of kitchen towel from the roll so he could dab his eyes and blow his nose.  
“What are you scared of Lens?” 

His question took her by surprise, and she passed the tissue to him thoughtfully.  
“When I was your age, I wasn’t that fond of heights.”  
He wrinkled his nose at that, then blew it noisily.  
“No, I mean reeally.”

The microwave counted past 00:03, 00:02. Lens opened the door before the horrific beeping woke up someone else. Stirring in a spoon of sugar, she cast an observant eye over the boy. He didn’t have a lot of friends in the home, he’d struggled since he first arrived. He preferred to keep to himself or to the birds in the yard. He had never been, what the files called a ‘problem child’, but he could tick a lot of boxes for potential monitoring when he grew out of PCOY. 

What he needed was to be understood. He wasn't dangerous, he was just lonely. She knew a lot of what that meant. She moved over to him, setting the plastic mug in his hands. He took it eagerly, wrapping his dark fingers over the faded Striped Eagle print. 

How to explain how isolating it could be, every day…?

“Do you know what always makes me sad, Elliot?” She leant against the countertop beside him, taking a bag of chocolate pretzels out of its hiding place in the high cupboard.  
He blinked at her with big, deep eyes, half the milk gone already, she tore open the bag, 

“Being on my own.”  
“But you live here, with all of us,” he said, pausing for breath.  
“Don’t you ever find that even here with the others, you feel a little bit lonely sometimes?”

He set the empty cup down, a realisation dawning on him. Quietly he nodded, and she gave him two pretzels.  
“Sometimes,” he said. He looked like he wanted to say more, but perhaps wasn’t ready just yet.  
She crunched and smiled at him warmly.  
“Thing is though, then I’m happy when I have times like this, spending time with a friend like you.”  
“But then I’ll go to sleep, and you’ll be lonely.” The word ‘friend’ had mattered to him.

She cast her mind back upstairs. He was almost certainly gone by now. The idea of being discovered was too often, too much. Caution was more important than anything else to him. She didn’t know when she’d see him next, and that struck her worse than she thought it would. Her bed would be cold by now, cold and empty. She stared at her handful of pretzels, the chocolate melted slightly, and sighed.

“I will be for a little while. But there’s always tomorrow.”  
That seemed to satisfy his curiosity for now, she ate her pretzels and sealed the bag closed. Tucking it away behind the oat bran with a wink. Elliot grinned at her, their secret.

He took her hand to get down off the counter and continued to hold it while she rinsed out his mug, and nestled it into the top of the empty dishwasher. Sleepily, he let her lead him back to the door to his bedroom, patting the top of his head gently and waiting in the darkness until she was sure he was back in bed. 

Wearily, she made her way back down the corridor to her own room. Was there really any point in going back to bed? She could probably just step into her study and get started on her work, maybe catch a quick nap while the kids were at school. The thought filled her with an aching dread, so she bypassed the very idea of opening her laptop and instead stumbled her way back to bed. A few hours sleep were better than none. 

She was mentally constructing a phantom list of things she needed to do when she did have to get out of bed. As she opened the door, she heard a voice swear loudly in the darkness beyond.  
“You’re still here?” she said softly. He had pulled on his jeans she noted, “But you’re going.”  
She fought hard to keep the disappointment from her voice, slipping out of her dressing gown and crawling back into bed. He hesitated. 

“I didn’t know when you’d be back.” She didn’t feel it warranted a response, she just shuffled down further into bed. He continued, uncertainty in his voice, “You should watch out for that kid, recurring bad dreams at that age could be a sign of early empathic, telepathic of precognitive abilities.”  
“Or he could be an earnest little boy who can talk to birds, and had a bad dream about clowns after Ben left ‘IT’ in the DVD player.”  
He was silent for a moment.  
“You’re angry with me.” It wasn’t a question. She pulled her duvet tighter around herself in response. ‘Angry’ was the wrong word, she just felt put out. 

If she’d been alone, she would have been woken up by the light in the hall when Elliot came to see her, talked in the kitchen, and then gone back to bed with no concerns. But now she had a whole new complicated layer to manage. Half of her wished that he’d left while she was downstairs, and the other half wanted him to stay until morning. Neither side wanted whatever this was, with him half hovering, one foot out the door leaving her with an uneasy air of dissatisfaction.

The edge of her bed dipped as he sat down, his voice was soft as he touched her shoulder.  
“Lunar,” there was something in his voice that she couldn’t place. For all her skills, her ability to see through anything, she couldn’t get a read. She could feel her shoulder tingle where he touched her, even through the fabric. With a quiet breath, she rolled onto her back to look at him properly, his blue eyes seemed so bright to her. He swallowed, it sounded oddly loud and intimate in the silence of the bedroom they’d spent so many nights in. “Can I stay?” 

She didn’t know what she’d expected him to say, but it hadn’t been that. It must have shown, because he withdrew his hand sharply and made to stand up. His moment of vulnerability retreating behind decades of mental discipline. A sudden fear flooded her, and a realisation, she didn’t want him to leave.

“Yes.” It blurted out of her before she could form it into something more nuanced like ‘please, I’d like that.’ She was almost angry that he could do this to her. She’d wondered if the differences in their ages could be a problem, that he might be too young for her. Never did she feel more wrong than lying in her own bed, watching him get up to go, but wanting nothing more than to push her hands through his hair and hold him. She felt like a teenager. Despite helping years of teen supers come to terms with their life, there were some things that were just universal.

His smirk was infuriating, but she could see it laced with a weak sort of gratitude. Neither could admit it yet, maybe after all these years they were getting soft and needed more. She made space for him as his t-shirt and jeans were once again strewn carelessly across the floor. 

It was either the immediate lightness in her chest, or the warmth as he took her up in his arms again, but she knew it had been the right decision. She hid her smile against his shoulder, feeling sleep take hold.

“I’ll wake you up before I go.” She felt his voice rumbling through her as her cheek pressed against him, and then again as he bent to kiss the top of her head.  
Her hand came to rest on his chest. His heart was hammering: nervous. She thought she’d said ‘thanks’, but it was probably nothing close...

She woke up to the pale dawnlight and a warm hand on the back of her neck. It was intensely comforting and for a moment she was convinced that she didn’t need to get up, she could easily stay like this for the rest of the day. As she stirred she felt a rumble of awareness from him. His thumb rubbed her shoulder as he murmured against her hair.  
“You’ve got ten more minutes.”  
“Music to my ears,” she slurred, her mind split between confusion that he was able to exist on so little sleep let alone to be up first, and between and increasing distraction by whatever he was doing with his thumb.

She wasn’t sure which of them toughened first, but as she twisted away he moved, sliding out of the bed. Her eyes focusing on the light and tones of the room, she rolled over to watch him pad around half naked picking up his clothes from the floor. He caught her looking and grinned, pulling his t shirt over his head. She got up to rummage through her closet, stopping to kiss him as his head reemerged. She was allowed to appreciate his looks, but it was easier when he didn’t realise she was doing it.

They smiled like nervous teenagers as they got dressed in silence; enjoying one another’s company for a time, in a way they never had before. It was nice, it was relaxing. As both of them heard the distant sound of a youth shouting,

“Aleeex, stop it!” The children were awake. 

It cut the tension like scissors through elastic. He finished zipping up his hood and strode to her, his heavy boots leaving imprints in her thick carpet. Pulling her in close, he kissed her deeply. It was affection and passion in one, and she rose on the balls of her feet to meet him, a gentle whine escaping her throat. 

“I’ll see you then?” he said, pressing a rough kiss against her neck.  
“Whenever you’re free,” she smiled back, trailing a hand down his shoulder.

As he slipped through her window and out onto the fire escape, she smiled and shook her head. Maybe she wasn’t too old to still have it this bad?

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first fic for the Protean City Fic Jam. I've loved both of these characters since the beginning. I always felt like they deserved more, so gave them each other.


End file.
